Hurricane Katrina 'message in a bottle' comes home to New Orleans, nearly 8 years later

For almost eight years I’ve looked at it every day and wondered about you.” -- Park ranger Rob Turan

Angela Caballeros, 22, stands in her family’s living room in Broadmoor looking out the front door. Her mother and her grandmother are there, too. They can hardly wait to see the letter and meet the man who saved it, treasured it and vowed to return it to “the unknown Angela.”

“Oh, look, he’s in a park ranger car,” Angela says excitedly, and then Rob Turan walks into the house, holding the gift he has kept for so long and driven all the way from Chatanooga, Tenn., to give back. Hugs are shared, and a few tears are shed.

“This is the actual letter,” Rob says, his voice filled with emotion. “I took it home and had it framed, and for almost eight years I’ve looked at it every day and wondered about you.”

Finally, at the house where Angela, her mom, her stepdad and her grandmother weathered Hurricane Katrina, Rob’s questions are answered, and he is able to solve what he calls “the mystery of the storm.”

He and Angela take turns telling the story, filling in the missing pieces.

The one piece Rob had was the letter:

On Sept. 21, 2005, a park ranger with the National Park Service’s response team working on South Lopez Street noticed a plastic bottle with something inside it and called to Rob, the team leader. The men opened the bottle and pulled out a rolled-up sheet of looseleaf paper: a handwritten note from a 14-year-old girl. It was dated 8/29/05, 9:15 a.m., Uptown New Orleans.

“It was a real message in a bottle,” Rob says, still marveling that it had been found three weeks after the storm in all the debris.

If anyone is reading this ...

In it, the teenager wrote that she has gone through Hurricane Katrina and was in her house looking outside at “a mini Lake Pontchartrain.” She had been praying that her friends and relatives were OK and that she and her family would survive. She said her grandmother was pacing back and forth, saying, “Our roof is gone. Our roof is in the water.”

She ended by writing, “I guess I’ll have to wait and see what happens next. If anyone is reading this, keep me and my family in your prayers, and I will keep you in mine. God Bless.” It was signed, “Angela Caballeros.”

Rob tells the family that he couldn’t get the letter out of his mind.

“For me, it put an exclamation point on the storm and gave it a human face,” he says. “You became our symbol.”

He wondered if the 14-year-old and her grandmother were OK, where they had lived, what had happened to them when the water kept rising. He was amazed that a young girl in such a frightening situation was worrying more about everyone else than about herself. He made copies of the letter and handed them out to National Park Service employees who were helping with the disaster recovery.

“Your letter went all the way to the head of the Park Service,” he tells Angela. “Once I got her blessing, we were able to help people however we could."

A mission that grew

They had come to southeast Louisiana to find government workers and get them back on the job, but once they saw how great the community's need was, they did much more. They were deputized as U.S. Marshals, because of the gangs and gunshots. They ran missions through what Rob calls “the dead zone,” where the “bathtub ring” was.

He tells Angela’s family about the day he accompanied a woman to see the inside of her house for the first time. “She fainted, and I had to catch her,” he says.

He tells his favorite animal story about the big Cajun guy he met early one morning when his team was staying with a church group in Lockport and he was working out at a gym there. The man told him he had left his two cats in his second-story apartment in New Orleans and he was worried about them starving to death. He asked Rob if he could have someone check on them, and Rob passed along the information to an animal rescue group later that day.

“The next morning, this big old burly dude gives me the biggest hug, and he’s crying. He tells me he got his cats back,” Rob says.

He tells them how proud he was of his National Park Service team and how much they came to love the people of southeast Louisiana. “Everyone is so polite and friendly. They just can’t do enough for you,” he says.

He tells Angela how much her letter meant to his team, how it helped them get through the long, hot days.

“I’m glad I could do this for you all,” she tells him. “It’s pretty amazing.”

A pineapple Big Shot

Angela was on her grandmother’s side of the double when she wrote the letter. She drank a pineapple Big Shot that morning, and she put the letter inside the empty bottle and closed it tight. Then she stood on the front porch and dropped it into the rising tide swirling around the house.

“The water was coming up pretty fast,” she says.

She tells Rob she thought about the letter when she was graduating from Ben Franklin High School in 2009. She had started her freshman year a week before the storm hit, and her class was known as “the Katrina class.” She mentioned the letter to her friends in passing.

“I wondered if anyone had ever found that bottle,” she says.

She never thought about it again, until two weeks ago, when I called to tell her about the park ranger who had her letter and wanted to get it back to her.

“I didn’t know my letter was going to mean so much to somebody,” Angela tells Rob.

“I almost fainted when I heard you’d been found,” Rob says.

Only clue: a name

He had tried to locate her during the month he was in New Orleans, and then, after he went home, he tried to find her family. But he didn’t know where or how to look. He had nothing to go on but her name.

He prayed she had survived the storm, and later, when he found an Angela Guala Caballeros on Facebook, he hoped it was her. He sent her a friend request, but she didn’t respond, because she never saw it.

I heard about Rob’s quest to find Angela from my friend Rick Gupman, a ranger at Jean Lafitte National Historical Park, who worked with Rob after the storm. Rob had asked him to look for Angela, and Rick thought I might be able to help. I got contact information for her through her high school and found her in Hammond, where she's a senior at Southeastern Louisiana University, majoring in biological sciences.

When I called Rob, now a ranger at Chickamauga National Military Park, to tell him I had talked to Angela and she’d be happy to meet him, he said, “You’ve made my day. You’ve made my year.” At first, he told me he’d return the letter in September, but then he called me back to say he couldn’t wait that long.

And so on this afternoon, they have come together, in the house where Angela wrote the letter. Rob asks what happened after she dropped the bottle into the water and watched it float away, and the three women tell him how they and Angela’s stepdad carried food, family papers and photographs up to the attic. They show him how they climbed a rickety ladder to get up there before the floodwaters inundated the one-story house.

Harrowing helicopter rescue

We go outside and look up to see the small window they eventually climbed out of to trade the stifling heat of the attic for an army of mosquitoes. The four of them were there Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursday, when a helicopter showed up to rescue them, Angela’s mother, Karen Caballeros-Bacchus, motioned for it to go instead to a school on the next street, where another family was on the roof.

“Get them. They have a baby,” she shouted.

On Friday, the helicopter came back. A rope was lowered with a little X for them to perch on. All they had to do was hang on for dear life, one after the other. “Thank God, we got through it,” Angela’s mother says.

Angela tells about watching her grandmother, Geraldine Dangerfield, get airlifted, and then it was her turn. “I wasn’t scared,” she says.

When they were all on board, the helicopter took them to the airport. “I will never forget that ride, just looking back,” Angela’s mother says. “It was like the end of the world.”

“It was like ‘The Walking Dead,’” Angela adds. “People walking through water, just trying to survive.”

They tell Rob they ended up in a good place, Valley, Ala., where Angela’s stepdad had family. In December, they came back to New Orleans and began to rebuild their lives.

'It was real'

Rob shakes his head, gazing at three generations of Katrina survivors. “This was never mine,” he says, as he hands over his gift. “It was a message in a bottle, and it was real.”

“I’m very, very, very grateful,” Angela says, looking at the letter she wrote all those years ago. “I’ll have something to show my children. We made it through this terrible time in my life, and this is something I have to show for it.”

Then there are more hugs and dozens of pictures taken.

“I think I’ve made a lifelong friend,” Rob says, smiling at Angela.

And the college student and the park ranger promise to keep in touch.

“I’ll invite you to my graduation,” Angela tells him.

“And I’ll invite you to join the National Park Service as a biologist,” Turan says.